Her Latent Image Book

Her Latent Image Book

Her Latent Image

2016

artist book

“Her latent image” is a project that aims to investigate the empowerment of Romanian women in the early decades of the twentieth century as seen through a collection of vernacular photographs. The project tries to address the invisible history of women’s emancipation movement from Romania and exposes images which investigate this phenomenon based on a visual code of symbolic gestures or activities, appearance or clothing worn by the characters in the images. The selection of the images is subjective and does not seek to present a fair and rigorous history of the condition of women during the interwar period but rather to reflect on these issues and the social context and political status of women in relation to other European regions and changes that took place in architecture or visual arts during the era.

In a total of 120 pages, “Her latent image” contains 67 black and white images found in Romania, dating from the early 1920s until 1944. The images are taken from a personal archive of photos collected since autumn 2013 as well as from the collections of Matei Caltia and Stefan Sava.